This grippingly sinister tale of an imploding family on the eve of the First
World War is Michael Haneke's best film yet. Rating: * * * * *

Has any director, European or otherwise, made as many top-rate films this decade as the Austrian Michael Haneke? Code Unknown (2000); The Piano Teacher (2002), in which Isabelle Huppert gave one of the great performances in recent times; the eerily-apocalyptic Time of the Wolf (2003); Hidden (2005): leaving aside his misguided English-language remake of Funny Games, and sidestepping the question of whether it's possible to like a Haneke film – they can be so ascetic and severe as to make that verb seem a little wan – it's hard to deny that the ex-movie critic has created one of contemporary cinema's most formidable bodies of work.

Now, with The White Ribbon, he has out-done himself and produced the best film of his career, a tightly-wound, fully-fleshed and thoroughly mesmerizing drama set in a north German village during 1913 and 1914. It depicts a tightly-knit aristocratic estate in which everyone, from the local pastor and doctor to toiling Polish migrant labourers, knows their place. This brings them stability and food on the table. On the surface everything is fine. Then, as is so often the case in Haneke's films, a small incident disrupts the calm, exposes that calmness as illusory, and starts a train of events that threatens to overwhelm the whole social order.

It begins with a doctor (Rainer Bock) being badly injured after his horse stumbles over tripwire. Then a woman dies in a sawmill accident; her son, blaming the Baron (Ulrich Tukur), goes out and shreds his cabbage crop. Soon, a barn is set on fire. A child is beaten and tortured. Who is responsible for all these crimes? Why are they carrying them out? Haneke keeps us guessing with the skill of the best thriller directors.

Unlike most thriller directors though, he doesn't raise the tension levels simply in order to build up to a bloody denouement or catharsis. The goal he's set himself is far more challenging: to evoke the repression and quiet violence at the heart of many Protestant families during this period. The hideous incidents and deformations that scar the estate aren't aberrations; they're manifestations of a spiritual and psychological cruelty that underpins a neo-feudal society.

Haneke once claimed, "I want to rape my spectators into autonomy." Small wonder that he's often been branded a sadist and a bully who treats his characters with the same tenderness that a vivisectionist might show to a mouse. His weaker films such as Funny Games do indeed devolve towards finger-wagging moralism.

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The White Ribbon however benefits not only from the beauty of its language (styled after German novelist Theodore Fontaine, although rather clunkily translated by its English subtitler), but a delicately-handled romance between a jowly schoolmaster (Christian Friedel) and 17-year-old nanny Eva (Leonie Benesch).

The scenes in which they nervously court – going out for chaste wagon rides - are gentler and more endearing than anything Haneke has ever shown before. It's the teacher, now an old man, who narrates the story too, endowing it with the kind of bruised nostalgia recognizable to anyone who's seen Joseph Losey's The Go-Between (1970). Like that film, The White Ribbon, which gets its title from an item of clothing that the Pastor associates with moral purity, is about the loss of innocence.

Elements of comedy – dry and black, of course – also add to the tonal range. The Pastor, convinced that his teenage son's fondness for masturbation is a form of sickness, has him strapped to his bed each night. We laugh – out of nervousness, and also because we strongly suspect this will all end in tears.

The film, elegantly photographed by Christian Berger, was shot in colour and then digitally transformed into black and white. This helps not only to evoke the period in which it's set, but to create a useful mistrust: Haneke wants us to be a little estranged from what's going on so that we're in a better position to carry out a forensic analysis of the drama, to study rather than to identify with the characters and their emotions.

What are the lessons we're meant to draw from the film, Haneker's first in German for over a decade? One is surely about the brutality of a certain kind of authoritarian male: some of the scenes in which the Doctor talks down to his female colleague display levels of cold misogyny that will have viewers blanching.

However, to argue, as many writers have, that The White Ribbon is an allegory of incipient Nazism seems a little delimiting. I see it as a very contemporary story, one that could apply to any number of Middle Eastern countries, about the ways, at once trivial, mysterious and infinitely important, that terror creeps up on a state. And how easily a potentially righteous, even revolutionary violence can eat its own people.